


... Is Lost

by Sangerin



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:46:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8326678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: No Devore would smuggle telepaths. No Devore would dare. But these gaharay seem fearless - or else lacking intelligence on a grand scale.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written in June 2000. "Inspired" by what was then called the "Dover Tragedy" but what would now probably not even make the news.

Prax noticed, though it was only momentary. A lapse of judgment, perhaps. A flash of memory.

There were sixty on the ship. Only two left to be dealt with. They were terrified - not so much by us, by me, by what they knew would be their fate - but by what they had lived through.

Slow, agonising suffocation. Hearing in your mind as well as with your ears the death gasps of your friends and family. Feeling their mind tone disappear. Feeling each person die, even though it is too dark to see them. Knowing exactly how many of you are left, how close each one is to dying.

Not daring to cry out for fear of discovery. For fear of putting those still alive at risk of capture. Protecting yourself and the gaharay who, too, is risking their life for yours.

And in the end, only that deafening silence. Of sixty, only two. And so nearly none at all.

For the first time, I felt pity for a telepath.

And I hesitated. The memory of a story I told her floated back - of a tiny telepath girl, pulled, almost suffocated, from her hiding place. She thanked me for rescuing her. I patted her on the head and sent her away to die.

Telepaths are a threat to decent society. They have no respect for privacy, no respect for confidentiality. They will read your mind as an open book, and no matter how you try to close it, to keep that book from them, they will wrest it from your grasp and lay the contents out for all to see. They cannot be allowed to live.

Even the young telepaths must be dealt with. For they, in time, will grow. They will be as their parents - a thorn in the side of the Devore, in the side of any civilised people. And as those young telepaths grow, they will share information wider and wider, and then they will themselves reproduce. Far better to cut the rope here, than to allow this phage to spread throughout our people. Far better.

Sometimes the lengths to which telepaths will go surprises me. After all these years, they should be resigned to their fate. They know that if they try to avoid me - the Inspectorate, the Imperium - the camps await them. And they know that the camps mean death.

Yet still they try. They risk death - by suffocation, by molecular destabilisation, by all forms - they risk death to escape death. Or to avoid dying at our hands.

And still they are able to find gaharay to help them. No Devore would smuggle telepaths. No Devore would dare. But these gaharay seem fearless - or else lacking intelligence on a grand scale. Do these captains hesitate when the telepaths approach them? Do they stop to think of the end that awaits them?

Sometimes I think that these other gaharay are braver than she. Her crew were at risk, too. She already had three to protect, why not protect more? Simple efficiency. Yet I believe she would have opened her ship and her technology to those telepaths even if her own crew had not contained any.

She is that sort of person. She comes, I believe, from that sort of culture. The sort that will not hesitate to help those in need. Where all are as welcoming as she and her crew.

It should have been their downfall. It should have been her downfall. To accept those telepaths without hesitation was folly, and folly must not be rewarded. She hesitated before accepting me, and then, it was her hesitation that saved her.

So why am I so sure that my hesitation today, at the stench of those bodies, at the pain in the eyes of the telepaths, hesitation at their pleas of mercy - why am I so sure that it spells the end of my career? Possibly my life.

She who hesitated was saved. And yet he who hesitates…


End file.
